By Allen C. Guelzo
Monday, May 11, 2020
On August 14, 2019, the New York Times Magazine
dropped something of a historical bombshell on its readers. It was not some new
conspiracy theory about the Kennedy assassination or some breathtaking
revelation of the secret life of Millard Fillmore. It was much more dramatic.
It was called “The 1619 Project,” and it consumed an entire special 100-page
issue of the magazine. It also aimed at nothing less than a complete overhaul
of how we understand American history. It did not, however, meet with entire
agreement by American historians: At least two very diverse groups of American
historians and political scientists, one headed by myself
(and including eleven others) and another by my Princeton colleague Sean
Wilentz, wrote
letters to Jake Silverstein, the editor of the New York Times Magazine,
to question a host of gaffes and misstatements in The 1619 Project. All
of these were summarily waved away, and last week, The 1619 Project’s lead
essay sailed merrily to a Pulitzer Prize for commentary — although if “sailed”
is the right metaphor, the ship in question resembles the Bounty more
than the Cutty Sark.
The follies of The 1619 Project begin with its
title. Most of the time, when we think of how the United States began, we think
of 1776 — the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, George
Washington and Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. What The 1619 Project
asked us to do was to dial that beginning date back to 1619 — the year the
first African slaves were deposited on the shore of what was then the English
colony of Virginia. As The 1619 Project’s lead writer, journalist Nikole
Hannah-Jones, insists, this was the real moment of America’s beginnings. “No
aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years
of slavery that followed,” wrote Hannah-Jones. “Out of slavery — and the
anti-black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made
America exceptional: its economic might, its industrial power, its electoral
system, its diet and popular music, the inequities of its public health and
education, its astonishing penchant for violence, its income inequality, the
example it sets for the world as a land of freedom and equality, its slang, its
legal system and the endemic racial fears and hatreds that continue to plague
it to this day.”
For that reason, the purpose of The 1619 Project
has been “to reframe American history” by placing “the consequences of slavery
and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we
tell ourselves about who we are as a country.” And through the articles and
artistic contributions that compose The 1619 Project, Hannah-Jones and
her collaborators have presented us with a totally new vista of America: not
a land of hope, but one of misery; not a land of independence, but a
land whose founders staged their revolution against Britain in 1776 to protect
slaveholding; not a land of economic freedom and entrepreneurial
capitalism, but a land where capitalism is modeled on plantation slavery; not
a land that fought a great Civil War under a Great Emancipator, Abraham
Lincoln, to free the slaves, but a land where a racist Lincoln actually plotted
to deport freed slaves; a land where (in Kevin Kruse’s essay, “How Segregation
Caused Your Traffic Jam”) even modern urban traffic scrums are the product of
racially segregated city planning.
***
I have been a teacher of American history virtually all
my life, and if there is one lesson I have learned from all that, it’s to
beware of historical explanations that come down to one single cause. Human
events and motivations, like human relationships, are always more complicated than
that, and a cause that claims to explain everything usually winds up
explaining nothing. In the Middle Ages, people tried to explain the
movement of the stars and the planets by putting the earth at the center. When
the stars and the planets didn’t behave according to that, they invented more
and more elaborate explanations of why the earth had to be the center, until
finally all the elaborate explanations broke down of their own weight, and we
were ready for Copernicus. Of course, not every all-purpose explanation ends
with a whimper. In 1903, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion offered a
similar one-cause anti-Semitic explanation for global misery, and that, as the
history of the 20th century attests, ended very, very badly.
The experience of slavery explains a number of things
about American life; it doesn’t explain everything, because no one thing
could. Take The 1619 Project’s contentions one by one, put them under
the microscope, and watch them, like every hoarse-voiced conspiracy theory,
fall to pieces. Was the Revolution really fought to preserve slavery?
Hannah-Jones insists that “Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in
the barbaric institution,” leading American slaveholders to dread “growing
calls to abolish the slave trade” and resort to revolution to save it. (This
was an assertion so absurd that even one of the historians Hannah-Jones did
consult, Leslie M. Harris of Northwestern University, objected to including it
in The 1619 Project, only to be dismissed; Harris went public with her
objection, and the New York Times issued a grudging
“update.”)
But let the Revolutionaries speak for themselves. Before
the Revolution, Virginia tried to tax the slave trade out of existence, only to
have those enactments vetoed by the Privy Council in London. And it was
during the Revolution that the rebel colonies began enacting the first
emancipation plans, beginning with Pennsylvania in 1780 and Massachusetts in
1783. If the protection of slavery was that central to the Revolution, why did
5,000 African Americans fight against the British? Why is there a monument to
the black volunteers of the First Rhode Island — “The Patriots of African
Descent” — who shivered through the deadly winter at Valley Forge? Why, for
that matter, did Britain’s West Indian colonies, where slavery was far more
vital to the sugar economy and far more brutal in its oppression, refuse to
join the 13 North American colonies in revolt? Why, above all, if the
Revolution was so pro-slavery, did Thomas Jefferson believe in 1785 that
“emancipation is put into such a train that in a few years there will be no
slaves Northward of Maryland”?
But Hannah-Jones flings her accusation further than just
the Revolutionaries. She presents an image of Abraham Lincoln in 1862,
informing a delegation of “five esteemed free black men” at the White House
that black Americans were a “troublesome presence” and that his solution was
colonization — “to ship black people, once freed, to another country.” There is
no admission by Hannah-Jones that the “troublesome presence” phrase was not
Lincoln’s, but Lincoln quoting Henry Clay. No admission that recognizes that
colonization was actually a sugar-coating to ease the swallowing of
emancipation by white Northerners, “adopted” (as Frederick Milnes Edge wrote in
1862) “to silence the weak-nerved, whose name is legion.” No admission that
Lincoln had already composed an Emancipation Proclamation that would declare 3
million slaves “forever free,” or that colonization would be “sloughed off” by
him as a “barbarous humbug,” or that Lincoln would eventually be murdered by a
white supremacist in 1865 after calling for black voting rights, or that this
was the man whom Frederick Douglass described as “emphatically the black man’s
president.” This is a narrative in which black leaders who preached
reconciliation and seized hold of the American promise for themselves all but
disappear from view; this is a narrative in which white abolitionists vanish,
and in which 360,000 Union soldiers die in vain.
But Hannah-Jones’s follies are not the only ones on
display. Sociologist Matthew Desmond’s essay “American Capitalism Is Brutal.
You Can Trace That to the Plantation” (on the slavery-based roots of American
capitalism) declares that “the cotton houses and slave auction blocks” are “the
birth-place of America’s low-road approach to capitalism.” And the proof? Slave
plantations used “vertical reporting systems, double-entry record-keeping and
precise quantification” to extract the maximum ounce of profit from slave
labor; and they were so successful that “New Orleans boasted a denser
concentration of banking capital than New York City.”
Except, of course, that double-entry bookkeeping was an
innovation of the Italian
Renaissance, long before there was any economic system we could call
capitalism. Except, of course, that the banking capital of the entire
slaveholding South was smaller than that of New York City in 1858. Except, of
course, that it was Southern slaveholders who were capitalism’s most energetic
critics, declaring in the 1850s that “the unrestricted exploitation of
so-called free society is more oppressive to the laborer than domestic
slavery.” After all, reasoned the pro-slavery propagandist George Fitzhugh,
“the subsistence of a slave is safe; he cannot suffer from insufficient wages,
or from want of employment; he has not to save for sickness or old age; he has
not to provide for his family.” On those terms, Fitzhugh could boast that “a
Southern farm is the beau ideal of Communism,” not capitalism, “where each” in
good Marxist fashion “receives not according to his labor, but according to his
wants.”
***
The 1619 Project has one undeniable virtue: It
reminds us that the American story has not been a perfect one; that the
Founders knew that slavery was a violation of natural and moral right and yet
turned away from it in the self-deceiving hope that it was disappearing on its
own; that it took a horrendous Civil War to end slavery, and even then, it took
another 80 years of struggle before the civil penalties of slavery were made to
disappear. So let us agree on this much: Past generations of American
historians have been all too agreeable to airbrushing out or minimizing black
America’s claim to be American.
But is The 1619 Project the answer to that defect?
Already, 3,500 classrooms and five major urban school systems (including
Buffalo, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.) have adopted The 1619 Project
for their history curricula. As they do this, the results will be that we teach
schoolchildren that:
·
capitalism is a form of totalitarianism . . . so
that we may then think kindly of socialism.
·
we should pay reparations for slavery (and
Hannah-Jones has stated frankly that “the project is an argument for
reparations”), as though, to reverse Lincoln’s formula in his Second Inaugural
Address, every drop of blood drawn by the lash had not been paid for by
one drawn by the sword.
·
history is nothing more than a web of narratives
and interpretations, so that any connection of history to historical fact can
be ignored. As one enthusiastic backer of The 1619 Project confessed,
“often reading straight history doesn’t get us deep into emotion and
perspective and feeling,” and as we all surely believe, “emotion and
perspective and feeling” are infinitely more important than truth.
·
the America that Lincoln described as the
world’s “last, best hope” becomes a swamp of guilt, resentment, accusation, and
lethal mistrust.
Henry Ford once said that history was bunk, and his
saying has invited many people to shrug their shoulders and conclude, That’s
only history, why worry about it? Because, as Americans, our identity does
not rest on race, religion, blood, or soil, but on a historical proposition,
that all men are created equal. Take that away, render it vain, illusory, or
nugatory, and we lose all identity as Americans. And then what remains for us?
The great Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said that the first step a
tyrant takes toward enslaving a people is to steal their history, for in that
case, no one has anything from the past with which to compare the present, and
any horror can be normalized.
It was once said, as a commercial joke, that it’s not
nice to fool Mother Nature. The same is true in this case, but not as a joke:
It’s not nice to fool with history.
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